Paste: Do you think it’s a benefit to a character-driven show like yours that viewers get a week to absorb what they’ve seen and appreciate it?
Bialik: Yeah. Look, I’ve watched long movies in my life, so I understand that sometimes there are stories that are told in films that way. I’ve sat through Schindler’s List, and all the Lord of the Rings movies several times, so some stories do need to be told like that. For me, the TV format I like—I was raised on classic sitcoms and I’ve worked on two sitcoms now for many years—so, for me, I like a week in between. I used to watch soap operas with my mom, when I was home in the summers. I understood that that was an everyday thing. Honestly, I think there is a larger issue, which is that we’re living in a culture that’s a celebration of excess in a lot of ways, and I think that’s part of what we’re seeing with this binge-watching. I’ll save the rest of that for my own website to comment on it.
Paste: Are you looking at GrokNation as a business endeavor, or did it come about because you just wanted that creative outlet?
Bialik: I guess it’s both. I had been writing for Kveller for years. I mainly wrote about Jewish parenting. What we noticed is that a lot of the articles I wrote that weren’t about Jewish parenting were getting a lot of play, and so I wanted to start a platform where I had more freedom to write about a larger variety of things. If you look at our site, we actually have no advertising, so there’s no revenue. It’s not a lifestyle/celebrity website where we’re selling products and I’m getting a bit of everything that’s sold. We say we’re a website for people who collect thoughts, and not things. Eventually we will need to have advertising just to keep our business running. Also I’m working on having a large charity component to the website, because that was a lot of my interest, too—that other places were printing my articles and could make a lot of money off of them. I would honestly rather publish it myself, and have that money go to charity.
Paste: I want to return to your upcoming movie, Flight Before Christmas. This is something that you were a producer on and also starred in. How was this experience for you? Was it weird to be the face of a Christmas movie, of all things?
Bialik: I don’t necessarily call it a Christmas movie. It’s not a movie about Christmas. It’s a movie about two people who are getting on a flight at Christmastime. They could have both been Muslim, or both Jewish, or both Christmas celebrators. Obviously it’s a holiday-themed movie, because it’s about the holidays, but I don’t think of it like a Christmas movie. I mean, I’m a Jewish person who doesn’t celebrate Christmas, and I live with Christmas trees for the next two months solid. The movie opens with a lot of the travel conflict many of us find ourselves in, whether we celebrate Christmas or not, in traveling around the holidays. That’s the jumping-off point for the movie. But it’s very sweet.
Paste: Would you say that this is a movie that is appropriate for families, including parents and their present-day “whippersnappers”?
Bialik: Yeah. There’s no nudity. There’s no cursing. There’s none of that. There’s not even sexual innuendo. It’s a very, very sweet movie. And it’s got really good messages.